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Why Android Is the New Windows
An anonymous reader writes "Windows' dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways: reduced hardware costs, increased IT literacy and a standard development platform to name a few. Perhaps Android will bring similar benefits. But unless Google are very careful, it is likely to bring some of the same problems, too."
The biggest problem with Android is that from a developers point of view, it's a horrible platform. It's not just Android - this goes way back to early Symbian versions, Windows Mobile and other early mobile OS versions.
Basically, you have tons of different devices you need to support, all with different hardware, resolution and features. They might or might not have changes made by the phone manufacturer and/or telcos. They might have physical keyboards or only touchscreen. Maybe multitouch on some. Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all? Different API's supported by different versions of Android.. It's a nightmare.
This may now a days work okay for computers because they have a lot more power and space and you don't need to worry about batteries so much. But as for mobile developers, that's not true yet and it means you have to create and test your applications and games for every device and most likely make some changes and bugfixes to some of them. Take for example the popular Angry Birds game - the developers have outright said they just cannot support all the different Android devices.
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it. Much better for developers and for users. While Windows Phone 7 has definitely taken a better approach than before, they also haven't considered this issue.
I for one, welcome our new android overlords
Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways ... increased IT literacy
What?! That's like saying McDonald's did anything for fine cuisine. Gimme a break!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This guy claims Windows has all the malware/virus problems it has because it's the biggest target.
Why does /. link to these clueless bloggers? Can we at least link to articles where the writer has a grasp on the english language? You know, someone who knows the difference between "lose" and "loose"?
Looks like I'm sticking with the iPhone for a while then. I've gotten to the point where I'll happily sacrifice a small amount of money and a little flexibility in exchange for a well-vetted, vertically integrated solution rather than an assembly kit that I can use - if I wish - to build something great. With the increased power to do your own thing all to frequently comes the need to do your own thing, with your own time and your own money. Not on my phone, thanks - I'll leave tinkering to the hobbies I choose rather than a useful accessory for my life. And yes, I'm a developer.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
"The entire phenomenon of viruses and malware is a result of the proliferation of Windows, the people behind malware take advantage of that same standard development platform."
This sentence is so stupid that it invalidates the arguments contained within the entire article. Who thinks that if Apple and their marriage of hardware and software were to have only existed in some anti-Capra Steve Jobs as Mister Potter world of computing, that viruses and malware would have not existed? Because there are no viruses for MAC OS? By that logic, wouldn't NeXT Step have been the most secure UNIX ever? To lay the existence of malware at Redmond's feet is to be so ignorant of computing and O/S design as to make anything said about Android totally and completely moot.
DOS/Windows gave people more control over their computers. people had the software locally and could install anything they wanted. anytime.
same with my iphone. i have all the files local on my laptop. if apple pulls an app then i can still use it. all i do is add the .app file in itunes and it will still sync. if someone breaks an app with an update i can still use the old version if i keep all the files.
with android the app install process is in the cloud and controlled by google
Some of you should check the statistics on global smart phone dominance. You'll find Nokia in top spot by a very wide margin. Right now, it looks like more breathless anticipation for a platform that has a very, very long way to go to threaten Nokia's worldwide dominance.
You guys should try one sometime. The e7x series is great. Relatively open platform, lots of apps, total media freedom, total device freedom like tethering, turn it into a wireless access point, free maps/gps features, and reliable. The Communicator is awesome too. I couldn't afford to replace my old one.
I hereby dub thee, Android Reality Distortion Field.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways, reduced hardware costs
[citation needed]
You can't take the sky from me...
Android is open. By definition, open software gives complete freedom and has no issues.
Windows ... Android
Prepare for inflammatory statements. Also, I should note, I own and use an Android-based phone.
The closest phone equivalent to Windows on the PC is the iPhone. (Hilarious, I know - but Microsoft really isn't a serious contender in the phone market.) Tyrannical rule over the user experience, verily.
Android? Android goes straight to its roots - it's the equivalent of Linux on the desktop. A mishmash of bad design and truly horrible UX done by developers, with uncountable numbers of simply pathetic applications - a few true gems shining brightly among them, but it's hard to see a diamond floating in a sea of feces.
Unlike Linux on the desktop - Android has the fact that it's on phones going for it. Phones, by and large, are fashion accessories. Can it make calls? Send and receive SMS? Everything after that is a bonus, and your average consumer will put up with all manner of crap as long as the hardware is shiny and can be shown off to their friends.
unless Google are very careful
This. Google needs to sell off a street view van and hire some folks to make kind-but-stern suggestions on design and function to developers, especially for popular applications. Mind you, I am a fan of choice - but fuck the bazaar. The bazaar is an ugly eyesore lowering property values. Because it's not a bazaar. It's goddamned software with no sanity behind design, functionality, workflow, appearance...
So if Android is Windows, iOS is MacOS, does that make Maemo/Meego the Linux of the mobile world?
"My N900 runs Linux."
"So does my Android phone."
"But the N900 runs GNU/Linux!"
I still get to feel superior.
There are a couple of things that make this useless. Both Apple and Android run only signed code unless the user makes an effort to do otherwise. Google makes it a checkbox (which some carriers then remove). Browser exploits for either platform are equally likely.
another troubled Stagnant. as Linux
I don't know why I RTFA, and I still don't know why Android is the New Windows(TM), but at least now I can save your time.
1. Eventually Android will dominate the market.
You know, separation of software and hardware, blah blah.
2. Market dominated by one OS brand = Virus, malware, we're doomed!
From TFA: "The entire phenomenon of viruses and malware is a result of the proliferation of Windows".
3. Market dominated by one OS brand = Crappy product once in a while, we'll have no choise
Windows ME, Vista.
"but these .apk's aren't hidden" -
Yes they are... see below:
APK
P.S.=> /. always hides THIS "APK", because I post as an "anonymous coward"/non-registered user here, & what do I see in the tree nodes of replies on this forums? "hidden comment"... apk
The Register ran an article which said much the same thing (albeit worded rather differently) last month:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/19/mobile_phone_platforms/page2.html
I don't find the android platform any harder to code for than anything else; younger programmers do not want to learn Java and that is creating far more problems for the platform than malware.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
You know, someone manipulative with whom the dark forces of FUD are strong, but yet nerdy enough that one could develop a love-hate relationship.
Since you are obviously for Android, we can also discard the validity of your viewpoint.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Holy run-on sentence, Batman!
Windows grew up as a personal machine used by one user, in a corporate setting. Early PC administration was not centralized and most admins allowed root access to most applications. So almost all the app developers assumed root access. People familiar with work PCs bought the same OS for their homes too. There was this huge conflict of interest between the app-developers and the OS. Big turf battles between app-developers. Root access was common, so each app booted out the other and installed itself as the default handler. Fundamental reason for user losing control over their PC is the assumption "it is normal for applications to run as root".
Android is growing up in a different environment. People are aware of security issues, privacy issues, bad sites, malware dishing sites etc. There is no assumption that the user must give unlimited access/privilege to the applications. So security is likely to be better than windows, but not as strong as unix. The user is the system-administrator here. Most sys-admins are lazy. In the university unix world, lazy admins refuse to install apps that needed root access. In the user-is-the-admin world, the lazy users give in to the demands of the apps more easily. But they are not likely to be as lassie-faire as they were with windows.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The comparison to Windows is wrong. UNIX would be a much more accurate comparison. Microsoft kept Windows cohesive enough to ensure backward and lateral compatibility. UNIX did virtually none of that. As a result, we had many proprietary implementations and an application developer's nightmare. That is why its growth and longevity were limited. Android/Linux is just another generation of that legacy.
BTW, there is nothing wrong with that evolution. It just doesn't scale the same way.
"Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways, reduced hardware costs, increased IT literacy and a standard development platform to name a few, and perhaps Android will bring similar benefits, but unless Google are very careful it is likely to bring some of the same problems too..."
sure MS Word grammar check would put a green underline below this whopper of a run-on!
[FromTheMorning]
Consider Nokia who dominates europe. They are spinning their wheels trying to make a go of it with their own OS but this will fail in the face of the growing coupling of desktops and smart phones. There is no Nokia Desktop computer. So what are they going to do? They could go with Android but the problem is that then they compete directly with HTC and Samsung and eventually some not yet known "Dell"-like company from China. SO Nokia will eventually choose Win 7 to be able to have a premium system. And Microsoft will be happy to be entering the market in a more tightly controlled hardware system where they can more easily offer special features unique to Win7.
Likewise for HP and the WebOS. I don't think HP wants to be an Android house. Otherwise why did they buy WebOS? But it too will fail for the same reason as Nokia's OS.
Win7 will be like apple and offer a work-alike eco system for desktop and mobile platforms. innovations and developers will more easily target both directly rather than having to write for some cross platform API that works at the lowest common demoninator. Chrome OS will be a niche for a long time. (Perfect for my mom and millions of other people who only use web and e-mail and the occasional infrequent document.) It will be a long time before desktops are kaput. So Google has no real answer to Win7 and OSX on the desktop (yet...anyhow).
Thus android will do hansomly for a while while the market itself is expanding. But when Nokia and HP finally give up, Win 7 stands a huge chance of eating the android quite suddenly with an alternative with the advantages of the iPhone and an unfragmented distribution channel.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The article is really mistaken in a lot of ways. One of them is "lower hardware costs".
The thing is that Android sells more devices in total - but that's across a lot of hardware makers. No one hardware maker has sales approaching that of Apple, especially when you consider shared components between all the iOS devices. Because Apple is making a lot more devices, they also have a large economy of scale benefit.
That's why you have not seen tablets equal to the iPad that cost as much - they all leave some elements out, like a larger screen.
I don't think any one player will dominate the market, in that way I think Android will be very unlike Windows. Instead we as consumers should see a ton of healthy innovation over many years from all platforms, which I am really looking forward to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Windows has given us a way to differentiate between those who are and aren't IT literate.
In each new generation of technology, the wizard - the geek - gets shoved a little farther into the background.
The masses in their billions take to Windows. It happened to the automobile with the invention of the electric starter, and in radio with the invention of the superhet and network broadcasting.
Multitouch doesn't work right. Even single touch is fidgety and glitchy. Interactivity is rough... lots of hitches in animations, complete multi-second freezes for no apparent reason, allowing of apps to take over and drag everything down. I have a few different Android devices, and on every one of them I have to yank the battery every couple of weeks to get them un-stuck.
It's nowhere close to as polished as iOS. For a techy user that knows how to deal with these issues and enjoys the openness, it's fine. For Joe Anyuser, it's a pale imitation of iOS.
Perhaps your insight explains the patent battle. Noika and Motorola are painted into a corner and have to now compete against Asian manufacturers without any distinguishing characteristics. Android even hold back the technology innovation. So they are seeing if they can get a hail mary patent pass. there's three outcomes to that pass possible
1) they win outright, and kill off the other hardware manufacturer's edge.
2) they get a paper win by cross liscencing to apple in return for setting the precedent they can use to hold off the cheap handset competition.
3) they loose and then as you said, now have to go to win7 or die a slow android homgenization death.
Thus patents are in play now.
Hey You Slashdoty!!!
I'll sue you for wasting my time on such a foolish article!!!
Lame to link to your own blog... Who are you anyways?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Windows' dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways: reduced hardware costs, increased IT literacy and a standard development platform to name a few."
And this, on /. ?! Seriously?
Am I dreaming or is this the biggest troll ever?
Geez, that guy nearly broke my brain. "unless Google are careful...", "Google have made..." The author is apparently British. Sounds like he needs an English as Second Language class.
Diverse choices for end users worked out well for the WinTel epoch. It'll work out fine for the mobile epoch. "Android monoculture?" It is to laugh. There are lots of interesting, useful mobile operating systems and many of them are doing well. It just happens none of them come from Microsoft.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
.
Reduced hardware costs compared to what? Increases IT literacy compared to what?
How do you know that hardware would actually be more expensive had it not been for Windows?
No one knows what the world would have been like if Microsoft had not used illegal business tactics to create and leverage its monopoly and to suck the profits out of the PC industry. Perhaps hardware would be even less expensive had some of the profits that Microsoft usurped gone to the R&D of hardware manufacturers.
Android does not have the brand recognition or mindshare that Apple's iPhone and iPod brand has. Android has had an easy time in the U.S. because AT&T is the only iPhone carrier in the U.S. In effect, the Android/iPhone competition has been hampered by the carrier divide. Once the iPhone hits Verizon (and maybe other carriers) iPhone & Android will truly compete head to head. Given the iPhone/iPod's brand recognition and this interesting analysis of Android performance in the Verizon world, it could get very ugly for Android very quickly.
Android may become the new Windows or it may become than next Symbian.
Android's chief resemblance to Windows is the architecture. The Android SDK is the Win32 of the mobile world.
There has been a lot of discussion of late comparing the Apple iOS market and the Android market to the battle between Windows and MacOS many years ago. I think this comparison is misleading, and I think people looking at todays "OS Wars" would do well to remember the "OS Wars" of yesterday.
The comparison goes like this: Apple makes a proprietary device, with their own OS on it, and you can only get it from them. Google makes an OS (Android) that they license to multiple vendors, and you can get it on a large variety of hardware. This makes Google Android the Microsoft Windows of this battle.
Except that what a lot of people don't remember is that when Windows rose to dominance, Apple wasn't their only competitor. The truly entrenched product was Unix. And Unix owned the Datacenter. Unix people couldn't imagine Microsoft Windows ever being inside their Datacenter. It was inconceivable. And so the Unix vendors engaged in what we now call the "Unix Wars".
In the Unix Wars, there were a lot of vendors selling variants of AT&Ts UNIX. Now, in theory, these would all be compatible with one another, because they all came from AT&T (or Berkeley) as a starting point. But the vendors all wanted to make their product better than the competition so they all added different things, so theirs would stand out. And Developers quickly found that they couldn't make one version of their application, but had to make multiple versions, one for each of the major UNIX products out there. They might have different graphical interfaces, or they might have different hardware capabilities. And so, the application market was splintered.
Microsoft, on the other hand, while allowing their product to run on absolutely anybodies hardware, was very controlling over how Windows looked and acted. You could buy Windows from CompaQ or from IBM but what you got was the same. You had the exact same interface, you had the exact same applications, you had the exact same programming libraries available, so developers could make one copy of their application and it would run everywhere Windows did. Microsoft controlled EXACTLY how Windows looked, what was on the desktop, what was on the menu bar, no matter who you bought it from.
It is Apple, not Google, who is following this model. Sure, iPhones are only available from AT&T in this country, but they are available in a lot of other countries, from a lot of other vendors. And you can run your app on any of them, they'll all look and work the same. And when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and you can get an iPhone on other carriers, it will still look and act exactly like an iPhone.
Google, on the other hand, lets the carrier modify their OS how they see fit, and we are seeing a repeat of the "Unix Wars" all over again. Each carrier tries to make their version better, put a better front end on it, change how the hardware works, make theirs just a tiny bit shinier so people will buy it instead of the identical version from their competitor. And the Developers have to deal with that difference, and the Android market is fractured, at least a little bit, because of it.
iOS vs Android isn't MacOS vs Windows. It's Windows vs Unix. And Apple is playing the role of Microsoft this time.
I'm also an Android developer and I don't share those concerns. There have been some frustrations, yes, but there are usually decent workarounds for a lot of things. As an example: Bluetooth support wasn't really solid until 2.0, yet there are excellent backport open-source libraries that make it easy to provide that support to 1.5 and 1.6 devices.
I completely disagree about reflection as well. Using reflection you can degrade gracefully for platforms that dont support what you're doing. Reflection is not ugly at all, it actually quite an elegant deign pattern imho.
If you're ending up with 6 layouts for each screen you're doing something wrong and perhaps overreaching in your support for older devices or your layout is overly complicated. It's unreasonable to think the latest Mass Effect game would run on a tiny 320x240 screen. And while that's hyperbole, yes, the point is made.
Just to be clear though, I don't find you concerns invalid, However I don't think this is unique to Android.
Granted there is still much work Google and the manufacturers could do to streamline all of this. But any software development platform, any OS, has some level of variation for what is supported. OSX, Linux, iOS, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, HTML5/JS/CSS, Blackberry OS. Really the only platforms that don't, are the video game consoles. But now even that's starting to happen there too with external storage and peripherals.
meep
People always forget that windows didn't neccessarily dominate from anything THEY were doing... it was from the standardization to the IBM i386 platform that they just happened to be the OS of choice for at the time.
Android wont take over until people care about open software standards. How do you make them care? Provide some sort of benefit. In the case of the i386 platform it was hardware manufacturers that got behind it because they now only had to write one set of drivers and had universal specifications to build their designs around.
The real quest is is there a similar benefit to software developers? I dont see one.
People who know better hate Apple, but for each one of them theres 3 that dont care. I would say expect an oliogopy where apples a big player.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I prefer to refer to it as the next Linux.
There's an awful lot of FUD / BS / rubbish in the parent post.
Basically, you have tons of different devices you need to support, all with different hardware, resolution and features. They might or might not have changes made by the phone manufacturer and/or telcos. They might have physical keyboards or only touchscreen. Maybe multitouch on some.
None of which matters for any sensible application. Android provides all the tools you need to add resources for different resolutions, or if you don't want to, just ship hi res resources and it scales them for you. The SDK makes it trivial to target any subset of phones with particular features and your app just won't appear for phones that don't have them.
Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all?
This is identical to iOS, a platform you seem to think is wonderful.
Different API's supported by different versions of Android.. It's a nightmare.
A nightmare??? The first thing the SDK does when you create a project is ask you what API level you want to target and from that point on all the APIs are set up for you so that anything not supported by your target platforms is a compile error. Far from being a nightmare, it couldn't be more trivial.
it means you have to create and test your applications and games for every device and most likely make some changes and bugfixes to some of them.
Granted, you do usually need to test on real hardware for a variety of phones. But it's hardly what you suggest - having 3 or 4 devices is more than sufficient for an average app and Google's error reporting system gives you complete stack traces from the field so you can quickly track down problems with devices you don't have.
Take for example the popular Angry Birds game - the developers have outright said they just cannot support all the different Android devices.
Here you really jump the shark. The Angry Birds developers explicitly wrote a post about how great it was to develop for Android and the amazing number of devices they were able to ship to with relative ease. The only reason there is a "lite" version coming is because some devices are so old and slow they just can't satisfy performance and memory requirements, but that's simply a factor of being old. Your 1G iPod Touch won't run the high end games in the Apple App Store either.
Whoa... The reduced hardware cost point is, IMO, debatable. I'll concede that it may have had some effect but I would have expected PC hardware costs to go down eventually even if Windows hadn't appeared. Some other OS or computing environment would certainly have arisen and caused a wide adoption of the desktop computer. For example, what if Apple hadn't kept its prices so high in the early days? I was hardly the only person who held off from buying a PC because Apple ][s cost so much. (At the time, at least.)
But to say that Windows has increased IT literacy is laughable. Unless by "literacy" you mean that more people were able to touch a computer. Unfortunately, many if those people, though, may have a hard time spelling IT -- even if you spot them the "I".
Whatever good Windows might have had on the PC industry has been greatly overshadowed by the negatives. Granted, what I consider a negative can be, in some cases, a positive for you. If you happen to run an anti-virus software company, that is. For most people, Windows has had a negative affect on their use of computers. I realize I'm preaching to the choir on this site but prior to the widespread use of Windows, few computer users had to: deal with spam (and, thanks to Windows, that includes users of non-Windows operating systems), pay extra for anti-virus software, pay for weird registry cleaning software, pay for forced application upgrades due to file format changes made for no other reason than to force an upgrade (obviously not really Windows's fault but hasn't happened to users of similar applicaitons that run on other OSs), wasted time rebooting for the least little computer problem, the list goes on...
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If you are creating an operating system that can be extended to support new devices with different hardware, it is a given that fragmentation will occur. In the end, fragmentation abates as hardware manufacturers start seeing software publishers ignore devices because of compatibility. This process is not working well with cell phones because of the 1 and 2 year contract models the carriers use to sell phones. People often don't know the device they are buying has issues or isn't going to get any software maintenance or upgrades until after the return period expires on their smartphone purchase, so they have to wait until the contract is up.
-- $G
You know the anti-Apple is getting pretty strong here. The summary actually *promotes* Windows, which used to be the most hated platform of all here. There are thing to respect about Android, but don't be so quick to shun iOS, webOS, and the other useful and innovative OSs out there.
You're confusing the device and the brand.
Economy of scale. Arguably, the Windows OS brought the PC into a large number of homes, spurring the sale of workstations/PCs in ever higher numbers.
Smaller PCs and consumer demand created the economy of scale. Bill Gates or Windows didn't "bring" the PC anywhere, just just made software.
But agree with you here:
Hence, computers got cheaper because we were buying more of them.
Yes, it was *computers* not the OS they were running. If anything, it's the microchip that took the computer from the lab to the living room.
Thank you Dave Raggett
To me Android seems very, very slow, and butt ugly. I remember running windows 3.1 pretty fast
on hardware 1/10th of what most Android devices have, but according to the Marketplace app, one
of the top three apps is Advanced Task Killer. It just seems unfinished to me, also just tryed it on a
Tegra 2 based tablet and it still just stumbled along.
Computer literacy ? Really ?
Outside of the professionals, I see some form of literacy mostly with those who stay away from Windows. With a few exeptions, the majority of casual Windows users is like a tourist who has learned to say "pizza", "toilet", "bed" and "thank you", but has next to no idea of the grammar or other concepts of the language.
Then again, I suppose "more people using one" equals "more literacy" to some.
What a depressingly stupid machine.